The Atheist's Companion on "sterile" Quakers

Back in the mid-70's, I spent a lot of time in the Russian-language holdings at Carleton University's library. Somehow I came across a book entitled The Atheist's Companion. It was composed of encyclopedia-style articles on the world's religions, along with assessments of their inadequacies in Marxist terms.

Having recently discovered Quakers at the time, I flipped through the book to see if it said anything about us. It did! To my amusement, it listed a lot of our positive features, and then abruptly dismissed our "reactionary morality" as "sterile."

Thanks to the Internet, I found the text of this propaganda classic, so you can see this assessment for yourself:

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The Quaker sect arose during the English bourgeois revolution among the urban poor, on the basis of Anabaptist and other heresies, as a result of disillusionment with a revolution that gave nothing to the people. Its founder George Fox (1624-1691) came to the conclusion that the truth is not in the sacred books, but in the hearts of people. Truth should be sought in the “inner light” that illuminates a person and that testifies to the presence of Christ in the believer. The doctrine of the "inner light", which is placed above the scriptures and the church, is the main point of Quakerism.

The term "Quakers" means "tremblers", the name given in mockery, due to the convulsive movements, seizures, which in early times accompanied Quaker prayers. Quakers deny any specific worship and sacraments, rites, clergy. Quaker meetings take place in empty rooms; silently, with covered heads, they sit in anticipation of being illuminated by the light from above, until some member of the community will feel "full of light" and will begin to preach. Singing and music at Quaker meetings are not permitted. Marriages between Quakers are accomplished with a simple promise of fidelity in the presence of elders. Burials take place without any ceremony. Quakers are characterized by a rejection of luxury; at first they did not allow themselves theatre, dance, or sports. Quakers place a high value on the independence of the individual, and therefore they do not remove their hats before anything or anyone; they deny titles and address everyone as “thee” and “thou” [not the plural "you" to individuals]; they do not kneel.

Quakers teach that one should not count on changing the people at the head of the government in order to make things better; improvement can only be expected from the spirit. They deny violence, war, oaths, and preach “non-resistance to evil”; they teach about universal brotherhood; they widely practice charitable work and religious tolerance. Quakers’ reactionary morality, which replaces social revolution with moral evolution, is sterile.

Each community meets once a month for moral discipline, to provide advice, and to resolve any disputes between individual members. The highest authority is the yearly Quaker meetings of a given country, below that level are the quarterly meetings of several congregations.

At first, Quakers were cruelly persecuted. For example, in 1656-1658, 9,000 Quakers in England were imprisoned. The Toleration Act of 1689 put an end to the persecution of Quakers in England. In 1682, the Quaker Penn bought the land on the Delaware in North America from the English government, and founded the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, but it was not until 1724 that the Quakers ceased to be persecuted in other colonies of North America. The Quakers advocated for the freedom of blacks, some of the Quakers participating as armed soldiers in the war between the North and the South. In 1957 there were 180 thousand Quakers, of which 120 thousand were in the USA, 22 thousand in England, 20 thousand in East Africa. Quakers advocate peaceful coexistence.

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Setting aside our reactionary morality for the moment, you can draw your own conclusions about the selectivity and uniformity of this description of Friends, and its compressed timeline. I wonder why the words "Friend," "Society of Friends," "Friends church" never appear.

You may have noticed that the word "spirit" is not capitalized, but in Soviet times publishers also didn't capitalize "God." (Dostoevsky gave God a capital G, but his Soviet-era publishers did not.)

"Peaceful coexistence" isn't just an abstract term. It was a policy and a propagandists' talking point granting that the NATO countries and the USSR could live together peacefully, and challenging the Western countries to make the same declaration. Of course, one could say that "peaceful coexistence" might be an example of a substitution of "moral evolution" for "social revolution."

One final note: this is the second edition of The Atheist's Companion. Nobody apparently thought to do any fact-checking in revising the first edition from 1959. As it turns out, the 1961 entry on Quakers is almost identical to the 1959 edition, with no corrections. There are two interesting changes: 

1. In 1959, in the first paragraph, there's a bit more to the description of George Fox. "George Fox (1624-1691), having immersed himself in the Holy Scriptures, came to the conclusion...."
2. The 1959 edition also doesn't have that final sentence in the 1961 edition's third paragraph—nothing about our bourgeois morality. In fact, the 1959 edition, however inadequate, is 100% positive about us. I can't help wondering whether Nikita Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign at the time affected the book's editors.

To get contemporary descriptions of Quakers in Russian language, aside from our own site, you can get excellent treatments on Russian Wikipedia, and in the Orthodox Encyclopedia.

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Speaking of descriptions of Friends in Russian, see this exercise from a recent Woodbrooke study course in Friends, conducted in Russian. (Here's the Russian-language original of the exercise.)

Following up on last week's link to Russian Communists' rejecting Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, here's Alexey Uvarov's article on "Rehabbing Stalin."

The United Nations on conditions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Elder Chaplain Greg Morgan on his threescore years and ten, and ours.

Why Micah Bales loves the "divergent" Psalm 82.

Please take a look at my five questions on racism and racists.

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Austin John is "Sick and Tired"...

Nordic Yearly Meeting reflections

Friends approve the epistle from Nordic Yearly Meeting 2025, Stavanger, Norway.

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Michael Eccles and Julia Ryberg (with Arturo) were
the Nordic Yearly Meeting's main speakers.

I wrote last week's post during the first evening of the combined Nordic Yearly Meeting of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish Friends, July 3-6, 2025.

A week later, I'm back home, a little wobbly from 27 hours of travel but very grateful for my experiences and for the hospitality of Friends. Here are a few of my main impressions.

The departure of the sloop Restauration on its commemorative transatlantic voyage (video and links on last week's post) was a highlight of the first full day of the gathering, and marked a special anniversary in the history of Norwegian Quakers (and Norwegian-American history generally).

However, in the full context of the Nordic Yearly Meeting, this commemoration was not the center of attention. Friends conducted business in business sessions of their national yearly meetings and service organizations, received a live report from the Gaza Strip and collected funds for work in Gaza, and enjoyed each other's company in worship meetings and a variety of other settings. Our main speakers, Michael Eccles (Britain Yearly Meeting and Friends World Committee for Consultation, European and Middle East Section) and Julia Hinshaw-Ryberg (who has served Sweden Yearly Meeting and FWCC EMES in a variety of roles), interviewed each other on their experiences serving Friends and their encouragement to Nordic Friends to use their differences and commonalities to serve each other, Friends everywhere, and the wider world.

I didn't attend the separate Norwegian or Swedish business meetings, but heard that Norwegian Friends minuted that "... transgender, non-binary and all others, regardless of gender identity and gender expression, are welcome among Quakers." The full minute is available on Norway Yearly Meeting's Web site. (An unofficial bilingual version is here.)

Two overall impressions and one question:

Idealism: Given all the national and temperamental differences among participants, and the general acknowledgment of crises and tragedies in our world, Friends retain our idealism. In the social evening, we sang "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" without embarrassment. In the final meeting, one Friend stood and simply said, "'Here the Gospel of Joy begins.' Mark, chapter one, verse one." We remain a hopeful people.

Discernment: Friends continue to make space for quiet discernment. Prayer was evident and was invited often. All voices were heard, whether gentle or passionate.

Question: It's the same question I've had for fifty years. In the marketplace of faith communities and spiritual options, why do Quakers remain such a microscopic presence? Will we ever overcome our diffidence on the one hand, and our exceptionalist conceits (our boutique mentality) on the other, and finally provide access to a wider range of seekers?

I asked a related question in one of the Nordic Yearly Meeting workshops. Noting that we have often provided a safer alternative for skeptics and refugees from authoritarian religiosity, I asked whether we could also work harder to welcome people who are enthusiastic about their faith in Jesus but need a trustworthy place to live out that faith without power plays, theatrics, and exploitation of their enthusiasm?

The answer I got was familiar and dismissive—more or less "let the happy-clappy people go elsewhere." But is it a coincidence that our greatest period of growth was when we risked everything in the trust that "Christ has come to teach his people himself"? Now we generally offer a choice between varieties of generic evangelicalism on the one hand or "a quiet faith for a quiet people" on the other. Creative hybrids do exist, but as far as I can see, not many. And even in our tame state, miracles do happen! Still, if it's up to us, we may functionally become chaplaincies for ourselves and people we are already comfortable with.

It's come to this: In a Nordic population of about 28 million people, Friends number several hundred. In our faith movement's country of origin, Britain, we once reached something like 60,000 (1.15% of the population at the time, 1680); with the same proportion, we would now have roughly 800,000 Quakers in Britain, rather than the current figure of under 20,000 members and attenders.

God's promises will be fulfilled one way or another, whatever we Friends decide to do about increasing access to the trustworthy communities we're trying to build, and the amazing qualities and potential of those communities. So why do I remain discontent?

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Julia Ryberg, Arturo, Marius and Barbara Berntsen.

The story of Julia and Arturo will be published August 8.

Peter Blood-Patterson believes that the revival has come.

A Swedish-language children's book based on the story of Julia Hinshaw-Ryberg and Arturo, her 57-year-old parrot companion, is scheduled for publication in August 2025. Details here. Translations in Spanish and English are planned as well. We enjoyed Arturo's company at the Nordic Yearly Meeting.

Here are links to the epistles from Nordic Yearly Meeting 2025.

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Meanwhile ... Rule by caprice, malice, and decree: a recent summary by Heather Cox Richardson. "Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon."

Jemar Tisby comments on Trump's personal army.

Philip Bump on useful political lessons from Zohran Mamdani's college application. "America's understanding of race and ethnicity is still woefully simplistic."

Russia's Communist Party declares its disagreement with Khrushchev's historic "secret" speech denouncing Stalin's cult of personality.

Peter Wehner ponders the lack of evangelical response to the U.S. administration's abandonment of the bipartisan PEPFAR campaign against HIV.

It’s a revealing comparison: A decision by a venerated Christian relief agency to hire Christians in same-sex relationships caused an immediate, angry, and explosive reaction across the evangelical world, while the decision to effectively end a program that has saved more than 25 million lives on the African continent barely registers. Few of those who are aware of what’s happening have anything to say about it. And many who are inclined to say something pull back, fearful of the consequences. 

Mike Farley on aging's gifts of hiddenness. "Contentment is not seen as a character flaw."

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Nordic Yearly Meeting's multinational choir sings, and Arturo listens (visible after about 40 seconds).

Khrushchev and "gullible" Americans

To my readers in the USA: Thanksgiving blessings!

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Please help me evaluate and improve this site! My readers' survey is here--answer as many or as few questions as you like. Thank you!

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A real card-carrying Communist: Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev's party membership ID (with membership fees for 1954). Source.

I hadn't heard this particular piece of false witness before I saw it in my own relative's post on Facebook:

A sobering reminder. Almost exactly sixty years ago since Russia's Khrushchev delivered his Do you remember September 29, 1959? THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE:

"Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you; We’ll so weaken your economy, until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands." "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

Having studied Soviet and Russian history my whole adult life, this quotation did not ring true to me at all. Khrushchev was blustery, boastful, and prone to "harebrained schemes," as his colleagues charged when they ousted him in 1964, but he was convinced of the superiority of the Soviet Communist system, and seemed certain that this superiority, would, in the long run, "bury" Western capitalism. He really did say that Russia would catch up to, and overtake, the USA, but you will look in vain for any quotation of his that this victory would take place through "small doses of Socialism." The Marxist line is that capitalism itself is fatally flawed, and will fail when the working class becomes fully aware of their own exploitation.

Apparently this "you Americans are so gullible" quotation has been circulating in one form or another for a long time. Here's one review of its history; here's an earlier and more thorough study. And now it's flourishing again:

Notice the enhancements seemingly designed to increase the credibility of this fake: the exact date, the reference to "those that are old enough will remember this" -- and I even found someone willing to say that "It was Sept. 29, 1959, when Khrushchev delivered his prediction for America at the United Nations. I remember this like it was yesterday: The TV showed the coverage of him banging his shoe on the podium." That shoe incident (no podium involved, and perhaps no shoe!) took place in October 1960 in an unrelated context.

Another sharer of this fake quotation added, for good measure, another popular fake: the "eight levels of control" falsely attributed to another stock demon, Saul Alinsky.

I realize that using fake or artfully edited quotations to slander political opponents is not new. What fascinates me is how eager their audiences are to accept them and recirculate them. It's ironic to me that the real "gullible" Americans are not the ones mentioned in the fake Khrushchev text; it's the Americans who believe these sorts of campaigns, whatever side they come from. The graphic version of the Khrushchev quotation has been shared thousands of times from one user's profile alone. I don't have the time or patience to calculate the full circulation of all of these various versions over the years -- and of course I have no way of knowing how many times the repeaters are aware that it's a fake but use it anyway because it reinforces a message. 

What is that message today? Apparently, we are meant to be alarmed by one or more of these threats to our freedom:

1. Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" program is really a program of creeping socialism.
2. The Biden presidency is itself a fraud; the real winner of the 2020 U.S. presidential election was his predecessor.
3. Official public health measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 are part of the socialist conspiracy.
4. So are efforts to mitigate global warming.
5. So are efforts to confront systemic racism.
6. (What have I left off the list?)

To me, Khrushchev's threats (fake and real) now seem faintly ridiculous, the Soviet Union itself having failed, and the Russian Communist party having been utterly marginalized in today's Russia. The USA's Communist parties are microscopic and fragmented, and neither of our two major parties is even remotely socialist (assuming you use honest definitions). Ironically, most of the Russian efforts to subvert politics in the USA now either favor right-wing forces or simply promote cynicism.

My challenge to those who traffic in these fakes: yes, there is an actual threat facing our country. We are witnessing a slow-motion coup by the far right, reinforced by "Christian" nationalists and well-financed by the Trump money machine among others. Are you as ready to consider the evidence for this coup as you are to consider these worn-out fakes? Or are you part of a new generation of gullible Americans?

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If you are a Christian who likes to share misleading quotations, here's a post just for you (and me).

The Aspen Institute's report on information disorder in the USA.

Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises. When bad information becomes as prevalent, persuasive, and persistent as good information, it creates a chain reaction of harm.

"I don't mean any disrespect" ... seventy years after Joe McCarthy, John Neely Kennedy red-baits Saule Omarovka.

In support of the Freedom to Vote Act.

A film on militarism ... War School: The Battle for Britain's Children. Thanks to Sergei Nikitin for the link.

Josh Wilbur wants to know what religious leaders would do if actual (space) aliens showed up.

GOOD NEWS Associates: A new URL and Web site. Current Associates: Margaret Fraser, Christine Hall, Emily Provance, Jan Wood.

Are you looking for a reason to hope in a season that might tempt you to despair? Becky Ankeny has some words for you.

Caminando con la Biblia: A bilingual Bible study sponsored by Beacon Hill Friends House and Friends World Committee for Consultation.

Right Sharing of World Resources considers adding a partnership in a fourth country (after India, Sierra Leone, and Kenya) and issues its annual report (PDF).

Did I mention I'm running a readers' survey?

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For some reason I needed to hear this again:

Ordinary heroes

I read these two books in quick succession -- first The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis 1933-1945, then Word for Word: A Translator's Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia. For the past couple of weeks, while I've been reading them, I feel as if I've been given a glimpse of what it means for ordinary people to keep their heads above water ... or not ... in times where the lives of millions were hanging in the balance as the forces of good and evil struggled, and evil appeared triumphant.

Books and films about such periods often focus on well-known heroes and leaders, or on the wider conflicts and battles that provide convenient mileposts for the chronologies of the times. These two books are on a different scale; at their centers are stories of people who are not exactly typical, but who had no apparent power to influence events -- beyond the power of elemental decency and friendship in their own networks of relationships. Nor did they always make the right choices; both books vividly illustrate the occasions when compromise seems the only way forward.

These two books -- one about Hitler's Germany, the other about the Soviet Union -- are set up very differently. Catrine Clay writes as a historian. With the deliberate goal of shining a light on the two-thirds of Germans who never voted for the Nazis and who, for the most part, spent the whole of the Third Reich trying to survive unnoticed by their Nazi neighbors, Clay chose six Germans, along with their families and friends, to represent those two-thirds. To the extent possible, she uses letters, diaries, reminiscences, interviews, photos, and other first-hand documentation to bring them to life, but she stands at a writer's remove from them. Lilianna Lungina, on the other hand, is telling her own story. In fact, she is telling filmmaker Oleg Dorman her story, which became a television documentary series before being published as a book. The recording was made in 1997, almost at the last possible moment for such an important record: her dear husband Semyon Lungin died the year before, and Lilianna would die in 1998.

However different these setups might be, the two books have much in common. Families and friendships are always at the center -- nothing is said or done in isolation. As each person is confronted by the need to make fateful choices in the face of oppression, whether naked or subtle, the outcome may reinforce a lifelong alliance -- or prove to be a terrible betrayal.

One of Clay's representative Germans, Rudolf Ditzen, was a writer whom I already knew as the author of the amazing novel of German resistance, Every Man Dies Alone, written under his professional pseudonym Hans Fallada. But, during Nazi times, he was under unrelenting pressure to produce stories whose heroes and plots exalted National Socialism. Sometimes he played for time, putting off the requests to do a book or screenplay for the cause; sometimes he gave up and compromised.

Lilianna openly admits her compromises -- for example, in an incident following the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel:

When Alik Ginsburg was released from prison, he gathered material on the Sinyavsky-Daniel case and published the so-called White Book. He gave one copy to Nikolai Podgorny, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and the other copies he distributed among friends, with the request that they pass them on to others when they had finished reading them. He was arrested again. Sima and I were asked to sign a petition about him, but we refused; because at just that moment, at the end of the 1960s, I had received permission to go to France.... I desperately wanted to go, if only to connect my adult life with my childhood. I was afraid that they wouldn't let me out, I told myself that one more signature wouldn't matter ... I was terribly ashamed of myself. It tormented me, but I still didn't sign.

The cost of compromise is a theme with Catrine Clay as well:

It was the day before the Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933. Sebastian came from a conservative but anti-Nazi family. His best friend was Jewish. Everyone in the [High Court] library was suddenly tense. The library doors were flung open and an SA troop in their brown shirts marched in. They looked like the kind of guys who delivered beer from the local brewery, Sebastian said. They made their way from desk to desk, weeding out the Jews, including the Presiding Judge. Most of them had already picked up their leather briefcases and quietly slipped away -- two months of the Nazi terror regime was enough warning for them, not to mention Hitler's stated aims in Mein Kampf. The remaining Jews in the library were ordered to leave, never to return. But one stubborn student refused, insisting on his rights, and he was duly dragged from his desk, beaten and taken off into 'protective custody'. Then the SA went from desk to desk, checking. No one remonstrated. When they came to Sebastian, they asked: 'Are you an Aryan?' To his eternal shame and humiliation, he later admitted to his close friends, he replied, 'Yes.' As he left the building, he realised he'd betrayed his best friend. Everyone hearing the story ... knew what he meant, and each wondered what he would have done in Sebastian's place.

As I read The Good Germans, I couldn't help thinking of my own German family. I've told how I found out that my grandfather in Japan joined the Nazi party in 1934, even as my grandmother continued her opposition to the Nazis. As for the rest of my relatives, the ones who remained in Germany, I hope that most or all of them were among the suppressed two-thirds, but I honestly don't know.

Mira Perper

Tatiana Pavlova

Word for Word also hit me at a personal level. I almost felt as if I knew Lilianna Lungina personally. I did know a few members of her generation with similar commitments to decency and honor -- historian Tatiana Pavlova, who revived the Quaker movement in Russia, and Mira Perper, a literary scholar who collaborated with Indiana University's Bill Edgerton, among others. The interior scenes of Lungina's home reminded me of their homes, with every available space stuffed with books and papers.

Reading Dorman's printed account of Lungina's reminiscences, you'd think it had been edited for readability, but in fact what he recorded in print is what she spoke into the camera, with unrehearsed clarity and vigor. Here, for example, is her account of how she and her classmates were kicked out of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), followed by the Youtube excerpt in which she tells that story. I don't think you need to know the language to see what I mean about the clear and vigorous flow of her narrative.

When we were in the eighth grade, the fathers of two of our classmates were arrested.... Later their mothers were arrested, too; but at first it was only their fathers. At the school, a Komsomol meeting was immediately called to expel Volodya and Galya from the ranks, on some charge that appeared utterly awkward and idiotic to me. If young people today are reading this, I hope it will be useful to them to hear about the horrific absurdities of life during that period. Modern-day Communists walk around at demonstrations filled with nostalgia for the old times, and yet back then they expelled a fifteen-year-old boy and girl from the Komsomol because they had not managed to denounce their own parents before they were denounced by the KGBV (then NKVD). How do you like that? Not used to keeping my mouth shut yet, at my paltry fifteen years of age, I stood up and said that it was stupid, absurd, and impossible to expel children. First, no one would denounce their own parents; and, second, how could they have done so, on what grounds? The meeting was adjourned for a time, and after it resumed they expelled me for having dared speaking against their decision.

[When she and a classmate went to the local Komsomol office to protest the decision,] ... Why we had been expelled didn't interest anyone in the least. The expulsions of Galya Lifshitz and Volodya Sosnovsky didn't interest them, either....

I think this was the definitive moment in my disenchantment with the system, and my final rejection of it. I realized that it was rotten to the core. I saw that it was all performance, staged theatrics. I remember this very clearly -- my eighth-grade class, the visit to the local Komsomol office, the degree of apathy we met with, the lack of any desire even to pretend that they wanted to listen to us. This produced a very strong impression on a young, unprejudiced person. I realized that I simply couldn't accept such a system. Later, when my peers, my fellow students, especially during my studies at the Institute for Philosophy, Literature, and History, began to think critically about these matters, and to become disillusioned, it seemed that I was the wise one, that I had seen it all coming much earlier. But I want to stress that it wasn't really so. I had simply learned to exercise freedom of thought during my childhood abroad; and that faculty stayed with me. I wasn't better, or smarter, or more prescient, than anyone else. It was just that certain notions had formed in me early on, and had become so deep-rooted in my soul that even the mind-numbing stupefaction that was inculcated in all of us was powerless against them. This was why I didn't believe in the trials of the "enemies of the people" for a single minute. I was absolutely convinced that it was all staged; there wasn't a drop of doubt in my mind about it.

I'm very glad I have spent the last couple of weeks in the inspiring and sobering company of these ordinary heroes.

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Here are a couple of reviews of these books:

On The Good Germans.

On Word for Word.

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Source.  

The Leo Tolstoy Center for Nonviolence has assembled a variety of resources on practical nonviolence. Our old friend Vitalii Adamenko is part of the team behind the project, and I worked on some of the translations into English. In the words of the organizers,

For us, the most important concept in nonviolence is the value of human life. Therefore we focus on replacing the current methods of defense (both personal and collective), recognizing that a sustainable peace is impossible while maintaining violent security forces such as armies and police, the main tools of which are threats, murder, and bodily harm.

We also offer guidance for individuals seeking to live nonviolently — from overcoming personal indifference and aggressiveness, to renouncing citizenship, which is a status that relies on involuntary participation in crimes against human life.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Tamara Horsburgh's search for Christians with recent diagnoses of dementia who might be willing to be interviewed for her research on  "the impact of holding the Christian theologies of hope and suffering, when one is first diagnosed with dementia." Here is a simplified information sheet in case you might be willing to be interviewed or know someone who might consider Tamara's invitation.

Timothy Snyder on killing parents in bad faith.

Peter Wehner: "The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches."

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The Chambers Brothers and Joan Baez, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee."